If you think of animated movies, you most likely think of Disney or Pixar. It's a side effect of being raised in America - the mouse owns kids' movies, and he more or less has since 1989 - which is proven by the fact that in the 21-year history of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, only six films that don't fall under the Disney/Pixar umbrella have won the award.

But what if one of the animated films nominated...wasn't a kids' movie?

The Academy released those ever-so-interesting Oscar nominations this morning. They include the Disney films Encanto and Raya and the Last Dragon, Pixar's Luca, and the Sony animated picture The Mitchells vs. The Machines - but the last nomination went to a documentary called Flee.

Flee is an animated account of one real man's story of how he escaped Afghanistan as a child. I'll let Adam Mock's review of the film fill in the rest:

"Flee tells the incredible true story of Amin, a Afghani man living in Denmark on the verge of getting married to the man he loves. Never having faced his past, Amin is asked by his good friend, Rasmussen, to recall his harrowing past experiences as a child refugee; tales so painful, he couldn't even tell his fiancée."

This is an entirely different story than usually gets nominated for this category; this is an entirely different story than most of those told through animation in general, and it's an important tale - one about love, about family, about memory, about oppression and struggle and humanity. And, with refugee crises unfolding seemingly everywhere across the globe, it's a singularly important one to tell right now.

But how will the film fare in a category that many Oscars voters have historically thought of as the "kids' table," so to speak?

It's no secret that The Academy has a history of not taking animated films seriously.

In both 2015 and 2019, it came to the attention of many a fan of the animation medium that most of the Oscars voters hadn't even watched all the films in the Best Animated Feature category - and after some digging, found out that it is in fact the only category in which you are not required to have seen all the films in order to vote for a winner. You can say you have all the respect in the world for animation, but that rule omission was telling.

Adding a documentary to this category - especially one that has also been nominated for Best Documentary, which Flee has - is a sign of a shift in the perception of animation as a genre part and parcel with family films. Whether The Academy is doing this on purpose or was forced to by Flee's existence is something we can't know, but the result is the same:

Flee has forced The Academy to acknowledge that animation is a MEDIUM, not a genre.

That's what makes this year's Best Animated Picture category so interesting. Ordinarily, it would have been a slam dunk - people have been obsessing over Disney's Encanto. Lin-Manuel Miranda's music is incredible, with "We Don't Talk About Bruno" smashing Billboard records left and right week after week. More importantly, it tells an important story about Colombian heritage, as well as the role that inherited familial trauma can play in our lives.

Encanto is a beautiful and important animated film, and honestly probably one of the only ones I can think of that could have possibly offered competition to a movie as powerful and groundbreaking as Flee. Choosing the winner will be incredibly difficult - do they go with the slam dunk, everyone's favorite wholesome movie musical of the year? Or do they choose the documentary that came completely out of left field and showed us what animation can really be, beyond making sweet movies for children and families (and people who love musicals)?

The story Flee tells HAD to be told through animation - the anonymity that the medium provided was the only way Amir felt comfortable telling his story. How many stories have we lost to time and silence because people didn't realize there's a way to tell them that you don't have to put your face on? How much of this would be impossible to faithfully recreate in the real world without losing the thread in effects and casting and direction and all the logistics that go along with traditional moviemaking?

If there isn't in the very least some serious contention among the voters when it comes to The Best Animated Feature category this year, then they disrespect the whole category. I'm not saying Flee HAS to win, but if it doesn't, I want to hear the reasoning behind why. And if the reasoning is "my kid felt like watching this one," it will be time to throw hands.

In the end, this isn't about who wins the award this year - it's about The Academy, and their respect for animation as an art form as a whole. For the people who pour their hearts and souls into making these films, the last thing any of them want is to hear some snide voter offhandedly say, "I didn't watch it." Because when it comes right down to it, these Awards are a way to celebrate film - and you can't celebrate something you haven't even seen.

Tags: Lin-Manuel Miranda